And The Stars Will Sing: The Meaning Wars, #1

By Michelle Browne

It's her first job...and it's already going wrong.

Freshly graduated from university with a degree in engineering, Crystal approaches her placement on the wormhole-constructive ship Crossing Paths with nothing but enthusiasm. But while Crystal gets used to the ins and outs of a multispecies, multicultural ship, tension brews both at work and back home.

Not murdering her coworker Jai is hard enough; the last thing she needs are the terrifying errors cropping up on her maps. Reality and space are either tearing themselves apart - or someone else is attacking them. With conspiracies lurking everywhere, friendship won't be enough to see her through these dangerous new problems...

Fans of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series will enjoy this sometimes joyful, sometimes dark personal adventure set in a world of politics, bureaucracy - and piracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michelle Browne
• Release date: Jul 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201395506

Michelle Browne

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Book preview

A novel by Michelle Browne, (c) 2012. This work is protected under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5). International rights are owned by the author.

Text © Michelle Browne, 2012. Cover art © Michelle Browne and STSci (source photo) 2012.

New edition text © Michelle Browne, 2021. Cover art © Michelle Browne, Katie de Long, and STSci (source photo) 2016. (c) 2021. This work is protected under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5). International rights are owned by the author.

This work can be copied, distributed, displayed, and performed under the conditions of attribution to its author, that the work is not used for commercial purposes, and that no derivative works can be made based on it. 

The author gratefully acknowledges the use of the Hubble photo on the cover. Original photo is public domain and © by STSci.

Updated cover art, 2017, by Katie de Long.

This edition, © 2021.

This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental.  The characters are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

Content advisory:

This book includes scenes of violence, abuse, torture, and references to sexual assault. On a less serious note, for cultural reasons, Canadian spellings are used throughout.

Acknowledgements:

This book would never have come into being without the encouragement and contributions of the following people. Andrey Taskaev must be mentioned, as always, for his love, support, and enthusiasm, as well as some helpful advice and proofreading.

Books happen because other people make the world safe enough for them to grow. Through thick and thin, Adrian Kreutz, Anna Lewis, Amber Freeman, Brenda Joy Ferguson, C. L. Polk, Danica Dito, Deirdre Gould, Emily Kundrik, Kitten, Nethilia, Rachel Ironclad, Sarah Huntrods, Sarah Moon, Sascha Stronach, William Martin, Tom Whalley, and especially Zig Zag Claybourne kept ushering me back to my research and my Word files when my self-confidence and faith were flagging.

Alison Muir, Iskara Dankier, Fei Su, Joseph Picard, Kateryna Kyselova, Kay Laird, Kevin Leitch Leiver, and Savage Realmling helped me get my writing mojo back and enjoy some wonderful adventures (which may yet grace the page). Adrian and Al were especially great at offering squeals of delight over plot twists and encouragement. Elsewhere, Aaron Hagan, Carolynn Lemky, Elizabeth Smith, Ella White, Jason Barsi, Lucas Barsi, Matthew Smart, and Pamela Anita Vera were my companions in other epic tales of sword, sorcery, and humanitarian issues. And of course, Freyja Catton, Joey Eggleton, and other members of the Flock Discord and Facebook deserve my gratitude and glee for reminding me to write the weird things, and for giving me a place to crash and talk about life whenever I needed it. cheered me on and provided much-needed distractions and relief.

And as always, my parents-in-law, Antonina and Alexander Taskaev, as well as my brother-in-law Adrian Taskaev, encouraged my writing voraciously. Andrey Taskaev and Claire Reid, my beloved partners, kept me supplied with tea and vital encouragement.

I am so grateful for you all, and these adventures would not have happened without you.

1

Dear Sarah,

So, I find myself preparing for my first job, and I should be excited, but I’m really just dithering. I hope you don’t mind if I ramble at you. My messages will take a long time t get to you after this, so I guess I’m making the most of it. I’m looking forward to cam-chatting with you soon, but there’s something so calming about writing a nice, long letter.

I’m so worked up, but nothing’s even happened quite yet! At the moment, I’m standing here in my room and staring at my closets, wondering how much clothing I can reasonably get away with. I find myself agonizing over very small, stupid things. Can I possibly manage to fit my Altarian wool scarves in (thank you, by the way!) if I leave out the Orin sweater? This lilac perfume from Earth is expensive, so what if the bottle breaks and it spills? Will the customs agents take it, perhaps? What about the luneflower perfume. Luneflowers are grown everywhere, so I can replace it; can I get away with that much?

Meanwhile, these permabound books are heavy, but they’ve got sentimental value, and what if the online library doesn’t have them? At least my emails and letters from you don’t weigh anything, although I’d really like to take your gifts and these pictures of us...

Moving is always agonizing, but I’m going farther than I’ve ever been. Outside the Sol system, outside this cluster, and beyond the reaches of the five colonies. There’ll barely be any humans, from what I hear. I can’t decide whether I’m relieved or frightened that there won’t be any planetside visits without applications. Sure, it’s the fringes, but...well, I’m too worked up. Time for a walk.

Just got back. I keep trying to tell myself that I’ll have the photoglass displays, and I can upload pics of home whenever I want, but it just isn’t the same. Walking through the skyhalls with their tempered glass, trying to get a last look at the compound I call home—when’s the next time I’ll get a chance to see a violet sunrise or the Martian canyons? It’s been a while since I had a chance to go in a rover, and now it’s going to be months, maybe more than a year, before I can do that again.

I knew this was par for the course, but yikes. When are you and I going to hang out in person again, Sarah? When will I see my friends from the same program? Felix and Subhita said they’d write, but you know how things are when you leave university...

I’ve been out of the solar system before, but only once or twice, and never that far. Heck, we just kind of grazed St. Lawrence and went to the resort there, and all resorts are basically the same, so I’m not even sure that counts.

Still, I’m used to the misty sky here, and looking back home at Luna and Earth. When will I ever see Earth again? It’s not home, not really—all the smells are different, everything—but I’m used to seeing that bright blue point reappear every night during moonrise, watching like the mother planet it is. Well, what can I do?

Nice sunset, anyway, spreading out like a pitcher of spilled wine across the sky, until the blue-blackness of night revealed itself, pulling away the stained tablecloth of dusk. I think that’s how the opening of Ode to the Exodus went, but it’s been a while since I read any Blaine. Funny I’d remember a settlement poem at a time like this. I’m going to be a representative of humanity, though. I mean, we’ve been in the alliance for maybe fifty years. In the span of space, time, and history, that’s not long...

Time for sleep. Enough pacing. Still, the thought that everyone I’ve ever known, met, loved, slept with, liked, or despised will be parsecs away is just plain scary. And yet thrilling—I’m lucky to have gotten such a plum assignment when I’m basically just getting out of school. Good marks, yes, and high scores on the tolerance tests, but it was still luck and a starving job market that helped me snag this.

I hope you’re well—are you still looking for a job? You could always go to one of the colonies! It’d be an adventure. I know that’s far for you, but there’s so much to see. Anyway, I should at least try to sleep and pack, not in that order, so I’ll sign off for now.

Talk to you soon,

Crystal Weiss.

2

Dear Sarah,

I’ve been so busy for the last little while that I haven’t written at all. Sorry about the huge gap, even though you kind of knew it was coming. I’m writing this from the transport shuttle bumping its way to my final destination.

I am to work on the base-ship Crossing Paths, and we’re putting in a large permanent wormhole in the vicinity of Messier 14, as it used to be called. I mean, that’s vague, since there are a lot of stars there, but in terrestrial driving terms, it’ll be just off the highway and down a couple of turnoffs.

I’ll be helping to calculate the location of the wormhole relative to the fabric of local space-time, an important part of the job. If you don’t put the damn thing in the right place, you might accidentally cause a rip or tear and create a radical wormhole, the kind that can go, well, anywhere. You might end up halfway across the universe, or even in another dimension. Wormholes are like highway overpasses or tunnels under mountains, and a radical wormhole is like going into one of those when you don’t know where the ending is supposed to go. Anyway, it’s not good, they’re not stable, and it’s my job to avoid them.

We have programs calculate and adjust for the quantum overlap areas, known dimensional interplay, and thickness of universal fabric. Some of the mapping gets done by human beings